Randy Smith may be the most-respected, most well-liked man in the hotel industry. Not only do he and his firm, STR, provide the industry with an endless stream of critical, near-real-time data, but in doing so they maintain the highest levels of accuracy, confidentiality and integrity. That, and the fact everyone who works there is so darn nice, makes it a company to admire. For his role as the industry’s supreme data keeper and for his decades-long service to the hotel business, Smith will receive this year’s Stephen W. Brener Lodging Hospitality Silver Plate Award at next month’s New York University International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference.

Lodging Hospitality Publisher Gary Dietz will present the award to Smith at the conference’s opening-day luncheon on Monday, June 6 at the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel in New York City.

As legend goes, Smith and his wife Carolyn launched Smith Travel Research more than 25 years ago from the kitchen table of their Nashville home. Today, the firm gathers and disseminates lodging industry supply, demand and performance data from nearly every chain and independent hotel in the U.S. and in many other countries. From its headquarters in suburban Nashville, STR generates more than 70,000 unique e-mail messages weekly, each with 10 to 20 attachments. The STR Star Report, which shows a hotel’s operating performance relative to its competitive set, is never far from a hotel general manager’s grasp. This scorecard gives him or her—as well as the property’s owner—an instant snapshot of property performance.

We recently had a chance to chat with Smith, who’s now chairman of STR, about the company and his unique perspective on the hotel industry.

What changes have you seen in the hotel industry over the years?
It’s nice to see the industry recognized as more than just an operations business. Years ago, that was the extent of it, but today it’s not that simple. It’s a very involved industry and it’s thrilling to watch the industry evolve from what was a simple and straightforward industry 20 to 30 years when I got started to become the diverse and large industry it is today.

So the changes has been for the best?
In the early 1990s, when we had a real downturn following the huge supply growth we had in the 1980s, industry occupancy dropped to about 62 or 63% and we lost nearly $6 billion that year. Now we’re running 56-57% occupancy and we’ll make $20 billion this year. The industry has gotten very good at running hotels. We’re only using 56 or 57% of our assets, which is not a good thing, but the fact we can run hotels at this level and still be profitable as an industry is a remarkable achievement.

What are the biggest challenges facing the lodging industry?
The single biggest issue for the industry is figuring out how to price its product. Transparency has hit us broadside, and as an industry we’re still trying to grapple with that. When you throw transparency in pricing into a situation where you’re already drowning in multitudes of data, the big question is how does a typical general manager sort through all this stuff and figure out what he can charge for his [or her] hotel rooms.

What inspiration did you get from John Lesure [a legendary executive with the former Laventhol & Horwath accounting and consulting firm] in creating the company?
I was very fortunate to have the privilege of working for him and with him. He taught me how to do research on this industry. His knowledge of the industry was incredible. He and I working together in the L&H days created pretty much what the industry needed at that time in terms of information, but the cost of processing data was too high and the industry couldn’t move data around that well, either. He knew what needed to be done, but he was just ahead of his time. Once I left L&H and the cost of data processing started to come down, we thought we could make this thing work.

What was it like in the early days of the business?
Everyone says it was such an obvious thing, but from the day I started until I got Marriott into the program was nearly five years. We were not an overnight success. There was a lot of struggle through there. The industry did adopt our idea, and there were key people in the industry who played pivotal roles in it. The first people were from Holiday Inn, Hilton and Sheraton. They saw it right up front and jumped right on, and we’ve been off and running ever since.

How important is the integrity of your company and your data to your success?
It’s crucial. Being able to maintain and assure this industry that we keep their data confidential, and that we never disclose it is of utmost importance to us. I’m absolutely convinced we’re one of the very few companies that regularly and consistently ticks off our largest clients. They frequently come to us wanting certain reports and are willing to pay a lot of money for them, but we look at what they’re asking and know it would isolate a particular [competitive] hotel if we provided that data. So we tell them no. In order to keep this thing going, we must maintain that confidentiality.

There’s no question those rules we have about maintaining confidentiality and ensuring the integrity of these reports is the backbone of what we do. It we start issuing reports people don’t trust, we would be out of business tomorrow.

What’s the secret to STR’s reputation as a great place to work?
I’ve always chalked up my success to surrounding myself with people a lot smarter than I am, and since they’re smarter than I am I’ve got to treat them well. We look at this as a family. We’ve gotten much bigger [about 160 employees] so it’s harder to do that, but we’re still one big family A lot of it is goes back to the same business philosophy of treating our clients with respect and integrity.

What is your current focus within the company?
A big issue is what information does this industry need going forward. The question is not what information do we need but how do use this stuff. We have so much information flowing, the challenge is how do you consolidate and sift through and make it actionable. That’s what I spend my days thinking about.

What’s in the future for STR?
We’re living in the information age and we feel there’s a need for more information and better understanding of that information, and all of that needs to expand around the globe. Hotel managers in the U.S. know so much about their markets but they know a lot less in other parts of the world. We’re expanding both horizontally and vertically, expanding what we do and in more areas around the world. If it’s information or data that pertains to the hotel industry we feel it rightly belongs to us.